Beauty Revealed

Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting brings together some of the world’s finest examples of meiren hua (paintings of beautiful women), a largely neglected and misunderstood genre of Chinese painting spanning the country’s last imperial dynasty (1644–1912). Often dismissed as decorative or misinterpreted as highbrow portraits of ladies, these enigmatic and relatively unexamined works are the subject of close scholarly scrutiny in this publication. The corresponding exhibition includes works from the collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as well as loans from the British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a number of other American museums and private collections in England, Sweden and France.

Featured image, "Woman Preparing for a Bath," is reproduced from Beauty Revealed.

Published by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.Text by James Cahill, Chen Fongfong, Nancy Berliner, Sarah Handler, Julia M. White.

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting brings together some of the world’s finest examples of meiren hua (paintings of beautiful women), a largely neglected and misunderstood genre of Chinese painting spanning the country’s last imperial dynasty (1644–1912). Often dismissed as decorative or misinterpreted as highbrow portraits of ladies, these enigmatic and relatively unexamined works are the subject of close scholarly scrutiny in this publication. The corresponding exhibition includes works from the collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as well as loans from the British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a number of other American museums and private collections in England, Sweden and France.